


Genotypes and Phenotypes

by intrikate88



Category: Newsflesh Trilogy - Mira Grant
Genre: Adopted Sibling Relationship, Canonical Incest Relationship, F/M, POV First Person, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 12:38:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/926521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/pseuds/intrikate88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>No one would have cared that we weren't biologically related, or that we'd gone in for genetic testing when we turned sixteen, just to be absolutely sure. ... But we never, never wrote it down.</i>
</p>
<p>George and Shaun get biological relationship genetic testing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Genotypes and Phenotypes

There's a family photo album, an actual printed-out photos in a book album, of me and Shaun growing up that isn't press photos of public appearances or posed family portraits. It kind of goes along with the whole brave pre-Rising lifestyle Mom and Dad try to show, going out in public and decorating a house that looks like it's built for more than foiling zombies. All the photos in the album are digitized, of course; you never know when a magazine might need to write a feature on The Mason Family and need some perfect family shots; everything is on the market when it's for ratings. You can almost forget that, though, looking through the album; it's a perfect documentation of birthdays, first days of school, Shaun's first gun, me receiving an award for some national photography competition. 

 

There's one photo in there from when Shaun and I are about four years old. I don't know who took it, although it fits with Mom's precious-moments-for-the-public style more than anything else. Dad takes photos too, but most of his are the ones that have Mom in them, showing that she's such an involved mother. It all sounds so cynical, I know. Being a Mason will do that to you.

 

It was taken at some indoor playground, the upscale kind where you reserve playtimes so that a limited number of kids can run around on spongey-floored play structures for an hour at a time, carefully supervised by their parents. Most kids are about five years old before they reach forty pounds and are then at risk for splitting their skull open while falling off a seesaw and immediately amplifying, but anytime the potential for exposure and injury are combined, all the adults start getting very nervous, and ready to wrap themselves in steel-mesh canvas. 

 

I like the picture because it's real; Mom and Dad aren't in it, the lighting is off enough that no one composed the shot to be cute enough for the camera. I'm wearing a dress and leggings and the way the dress is torn at the waistline suggests it was one of the last cute dresses Mom attempted to clothe me in before she resorted to bribing me to look pretty where we might be seen. It's just me and Shaun, similar streaky brownish hair, and my hands firmly grabbing his head while he's kissing me on the mouth, our faces smushed together in simple little-kid love.

 

And this is the part where I could say "that was that last time things were simple, it was all downhill into complications from there," except that's not really true. Life was complicated. It did keep getting more complicated, but Shaun and I have never been complicated. I love him. He loves me. We've grown up and found more ways to love each other, but how we love each other is as simple as that image of four-year-old us grabbing each other and not letting go while the rest of the world stays busy with other things. 

 

But I'll never write that down, I'll just let the picture be what it is. Shaun and I document everything and distribute it for the world to see; the world thinks it sees everything, and so we'll never be asked about the one thing we never write down.

 

***

 

We weren't teenagers yet when we were moved into separate beds in separate rooms for no apparent reason we could see. I missed him sleeping next to me. He missed me, too.

 

We were eleven when I decided I needed my first bra and Shaun peered at my breasts and asked why and I told him he was a dumbass and, worse, a boy, which he answered by showing me that his balls had dropped and why don't boys get bras to cover those because getting kicked there hurts more than getting kicked in the chest. I told him he was gross, but we didn't think about not getting dressed and ready for school together, even if Mom did make me wait another three months to take me bra shopping.

 

We were thirteen when he shook me awake saying that he had wet the bed, except not really, and could I get off the bed and help him strip the sheets and put them in the sanitizer? I knew about periods and had had my own times shoving sheets in the sanitizer in the early hours of the morning, but boys didn't get periods, and it wasn't blood on the sheets. It wasn't until we had looked on the internet that we figured it out. "What were you dreaming about?" I asked him, and he looked away, and mumbled that he didn't remember. I would have just let it be, except I could see him blushing in the dark, and I had to know which girl at school he had a crush on. "I was… it was you, George," he said. I was old enough to know I should think that was weird. But I also thought, who else would it be, really?

 

We were fourteen when our friends stopped saying they had boyfriends and girlfriends just because they wanted to seem grown up and actually started kissing each other and all that. People I shared lunch with when Shaun and I had different lunch periods (it seemed a bit much to call them friends, really) had incessant discussions of who was hot and who wasn't. I didn't really care, but I agreed or disagreed with their assessments of the guys and girls we went to classes with, just because it meant that I could read the news on my phone instead of having conversations about who I liked if it wasn't anyone they pointed out. Shaun's friends were having similar discussions, and when he told me one night that he felt stupid because he'd never kissed a girl, we went ahead and stopped feeling stupid together. 

 

We were fifteen, and we talked about it, for real. There was a naivety that had disappeared when we started locking our doors and leaving a light on in Shaun's bedroom when he joined me in mine. We had never let anyone really see how deep our bond was before, but this was the beginning of knowing that we would be hiding that we were anything other than siblings. "Promise me you need- you want me as much as I want you," he pleaded, as we sat cross-legged on my bed, a small heap of condoms between us. I took off my sunglasses so that he could see as much of my eyes that there was to see, and know. "You're all I want, you idiot, haven't you paid attention?" He retorted, "You're the idiot, if you think you're not the one thing I always pay attention to."

 

"Then why do you fuck around with zombies when I tell you not to?"

 

"I said I pay attention, I didn't say I won't ignore what you tell me after that," he answered, and grinned, and I put the condoms in my nightstand drawer instead of the trash.

 

We turned sixteen and made an appointment at the genetic testing clinic. We were bloggers already, going out in the field, doing shit that was dangerous enough in an already dangerous world that we knew neither of us intended to have children. They didn't deserve to be the subject of headlines like THE MASONS AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN, among myriad other reasons, but I wanted to get tested anyway. The world is a strange place; maybe we had mothers who went to the same sperm bank when trying to conceive, maybe we were actually twins and were sent to different orphanages during the turmoil of the Rising: there were so many maybes. I didn't want to find any other family that I might have out there, and I didn't exactly care about breaking social taboos (we already hung around hazard zones, which was pretty damn taboo), but I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to arm myself with it so that no one could ever use our bond to try and destroy us. 

 

Our faces were too well-known to make up any story at the clinic, so we didn't. Sometimes honesty can be used to clarify things; other times it can be used to obscure them. That's why I care more about the truth than just honesty. We're such a close family, I told the doctor, that we want to see if we are possibly related somehow. If maybe we're really cousins, or half siblings. You never know.

 

We paid for all the tests we could. Mitochondrial matrilineal, to see if our mothers were related. Comparison of alleles at forty-six loci. Single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping. 

 

There wasn't even an indication that our parents had come from the same community and given us a common ancestor several generations back. We were as unrelated as it was possible to detect while both being of Caucasians of European descent, and as an additional bonus, neither of us was going to develop Huntington's disease. The hardest part was pretending we weren't pleased at the results, and even that wasn't hard, because really, Shaun was my brother in every way that mattered and knowing that we shared DNA would have cemented that for good.

 

But since we didn't, we used up three of the condoms in my nightstand drawer before the day was over. The test results we taped to the inside of the front cover of our shared journal, kept in my black box. 

 

The world went on the next day: we signed our paperwork and uploaded it for our certifications for higher-level hazard zones, we fought over the last of the cereal in the cupboard, Shaun threw my clothes in my face because I was busy coordinating bloggers in different time zones and was late getting ready for school, we picked up Buffy so we could get some video of me calling Shaun a suicidal Irwin for his blog while he ran and shot at things that we probably technically weren't allowed to be around, and life kept happening.

 

And nobody really ever knew that in the gaps between updated posts and uploaded videos what we were doing behind the screen when we'd removed all the cameras we wore, and everything else. It was the best thing we made and it wouldn't be a picture for anyone to see, no evidence left behind but our own memories, because the truth was that our love for each other is simple and documenting it makes it part of the complicated world.

 

I can hear Shaun on the phone arguing with someone that we should be allowed into Yosemite; I'm on the other side of the wall, leaving Mahir a message while I work on the application for our team to cover the presidential campaign of a senator from Wisconsin. Life is complicated and will probably become more so if one of us finds a way to achieve our current goals (although I'm pretty sure I'd prefer the complications of writing three million political posts a day and getting trolled out of my mind over timing our poking of zombies to coincide with the Old Faithful geyser just so we can see a zombie blasted into the air, like Shaun wants.) It's two in the morning, and really time to get in bed, if I want a chance of being functional when we hit the road early tomorrow for Modesto. I lean over in my chair to grab my nightshirt off the bed, and am just pulling it over my head when Shaun opens the door connecting our rooms and pokes his head in.

 

"Missing me?" he says, with a pointed glance at my bed.

 

"Yeah," I tell him, and pull him into my room.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to be as specific with genetic testing as I could, for no other real reason than that the books attempt to be detailed with their descriptions of epidemiology and immunology and I also looked shit up and wanted to use it, but that doesn't negate the fact that most of my reading about DNA has less to do with biological relationship testing and more with murine knockout alleles and autosomal risk factors in autoimmune diseases. If you're more familiar with genetic testing, please forgive my mistakes.


End file.
